My wife is currently down with some sort of stomach bug, and I’m just waiting for it to hit me, too. Should that happen, I will doubtlessly be spending some time with the only album I think of that feels like being under the weather, and that is Ween’s sophomore release, The Pod.

This disc seems to have a bad reputation, even among the group’s fans. I just happened to get on board with this release when it was new, and I was intrigued by a positive write-up in Spin magazine. It took me a while to become acclimated to the band’s odd stylings and sense of humor, though I was solidly a fan by the time their next release was out. Most of my friends, however, were completely baffled by my interest.

This is the only Ween album on the Shimmy Disc label, and it feels appropriate this particular title is on the label ran by Bongwater’s musical mastermind Kramer. And I especially mean the “bong” part of the name, even if that device here was supposedly used by Dean and Gene Ween to huff Scotchgard. They even have a friend wearing the alleged Scotchgard bong on the cover, pasted over Leonard Cohen’s in their debasement of his best-of LP. They would eventually claim they were only joking about their particular drug of choice, though there is a serious fog of some sort of chemical enhancement permeating these four-track recordings.

Drugs are only part of the zeitgeist in which one will be immersed when taking in the 75 minutes of The Pod. This is a curious snapshot of a singular time and place, even if neither is where most people would ever want to be. It isn’t any surprise the duo recorded on a horse farm in the summer, bombarded by flies and unable to escape the smell of horse shit. Every second of the recordings feel like they are the product of such an environments. Ween’s world at that time seemed to composed solely of prog rock, bad drugs, lousy jobs in fast food joints and inside jokes. Lots of inside jokes.

That aspect of this album (and the band’s catalog, overall), is probably the largest hurdle for neophytes to overcome. There are the first two parts of “The Stallion” (which would eventually become five parts over the span of their oeuvre), and I still have zero ideas what that is about. A sandwich that is pork roll, egg and cheese (on a kaiser bun) gets shout-outs a couple of times before the penultimate track is dedicated exclusively to it. There are assorted people it feels like we’re supposed to know, though we really only get names like Frank, Laura or Molly, but without defining characteristics.

Another element of the experience also has a track dedicated to it, and that is “Mononucleosis”, which apparently both men contracted. So, that makes more literal my association of this album with sickness.

To use the band’s parlance, this is the “brownest” of their platters. It is no surprise there is a track titled, “Can U Taste the Waste?” I swear I can even hear heat and humidity baked into the recordings, and other appropriately-named tracks are “Demon Sweat” and “Don’t Sweat It”. The latter especially sounds like they are sweating it.

But they mostly live in a fantasy world where they are rock gods of the kind from two decades earlier. Yes, they would eventually become a major concert draw, but that was still far in the future. Just the titles “Dr. Rock” and “Captain Fantasy” tell you everything you need to know about those songs. Perhaps the most appropriately-titled number in the set of nearly two dozen tunes is “Awesome Sound”, because it well and truly is.

I may be in the minority in believing The Pod is Ween’s best album, but it is doubtlessly the most consistent title in their catalog. To listen to it is to be briefly transported to an odd and very insular world of two guys who had no idea where the future might take them. For good or ill, they would not be able to recapture this twisted magic if they tried. It might be just as well, since Scotchgard has been banned since then.